Artie Wu brought the Lincoln Town Car to an abrupt nose-bobbing stop in front of Ione Gamble’s house on Adelaide Drive at 4:56 P.M. Durant made no move to get out and instead stared at the house as if it sheltered six of his worst enemies.
“Don’t much care for Spanish Colonial?” Wu said.
“It’s your rotten driving I don’t care for. Question: why is a ride with you like an IRS audit? Answer: because I know it’ll end in disaster.”
“We arrived safely.”
“By God’s grace.”
“What’s really bugging you?”
“Probably the Goodisons,” Durant said and opened the curbside door.
Shortly after Wu rang the two-note chimes, the front door was opened not by the Salvadoran housekeeper, but by Howard Mott in his dark blue suit, white shirt and quiet tie. He looked up at the visitors, studied them briefly, nodded twice and said, “If you’re Mr. Wu, then he’s Mr. Durant and I’m Howard Mott. Come on in.”
Once they were inside and the handshakes were over, Wu said, “First of all, we thank you for the business you’ve sent our way over the years — especially that Beirut deal.”
“The widow was both pleased and enriched, as well you know,” Mott said. “I also appreciate the clients you’ve referred to me. Some have been a bit odd, of course. A few were fascinating. All of them, thank God, were solvent and every last one of them was guilty as hell.”
“If they weren’t,” Durant said, “why would they need a thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer?”
“I don’t charge quite that much. Yet.”
“How’s your batting average?” Wu said.
“Eight of the ten you sent me were acquitted. The other two are improving their Ping-Pong skills at various minimum security joints in Pennsylvania and Florida.” Mott again stared, first at Durant, then at Wu, shook his head slightly and said, “I was just thinking it’s strange we haven’t met until now.”
“We try to avoid the need for legal counsel,” Durant said.
“Very wise,” Mott said, then asked, “Overby’s not coming?”
“No.”
“I hope to meet him while he’s in town. We’ve talked over the phone so many times I’ve come to think of him as a prospective client.”
“As well you might,” Wu said.
“So how’s my father-in-law?”
“In love,” Durant said.
“Really? Who with?”
“An ex-Secret Service agent. Georgia Blue.”
Mott frowned. “Wasn’t she the one in Hong Kong who they extradited to the Philippines for murder and—”
Wu didn’t let him finish. “The very same.”
“Well. The five of you. Together again. Must seem like a reunion.”
“Fortunately,” Durant said, “like all reunions, it’s only temporary.”
Mott obviously wanted to say more and even ask a question or two. Instead, he moved something around inside his mouth. Bit his tongue, Wu thought. Mott then glanced at his watch and announced the meeting would be upstairs in Ione Gamble’s office.
“Just the four of us?” Wu said as they started up the stairs.
“Is there supposed to be someone else?”
“You mentioned Jack Broach.”
“Jack couldn’t get away,” Mott said.
Ione Gamble wore a dark blue cable-knit cotton sweater with a deep V-neck over what looked like a raw-silk T-shirt. She also wore gray flannel pants and white Reeboks. As Mott made the introductions, Gamble shook Durant’s hand first and murmured something polite as she assessed the tweed jacket, custom-made chambray shirt, twill pants and the aged loafers that encased a pair of spirited argyle socks she wouldn’t see until he sat down and crossed his legs.
She smiled at Artie Wu next, shook his hand and said something nice as she took in the tieless white shirt with the semi-Byronic collar, the faintly raffish double-breasted blue blazer, the putty-colored pants and the gleaming black pebble-grained wing tips that he wore like a badge of respectability. She also noticed that Wu wore a wedding ring but Durant didn’t.
After the introductions, Gamble resumed her seat behind the Memphis cotton broker’s desk. Mott took the businesslike armchair and Wu and Durant settled for the couch with the chintz slipcover.
It was then that Durant crossed his legs, revealing the argyle socks, smiled at Ione Gamble and said what he’d been planning to say. “We’ve rented William Rice’s house in Malibu.”
Her surprise came and went quickly, replaced by a bleak stare that was aimed at Durant while she asked a question of Howard Mott. “Am I paying for the house, Howie?”
“Enno Glimm is,” Mott said.
The bleak stare gave way to a smile and she said, “Then I hope you guys enjoy it because it’s a lovely place.”
“Did you rent it just by happy chance?” Mott said.
Artie Wu nodded. “It’s one of those fortuitous events that may or may not prove useful. But as Miss Gamble says, it’s a hell of a house.”
“You’d better call me Ione and I’ll call you Artie and — Quincy, isn’t it?”
“Quincy,” Durant agreed. “Since we’re here to ask questions, maybe we should establish the ground rules. Are there any areas you want declared out of bounds?”
“If there are, I’ll tell you when to stay the fuck away.”
“That ought to be warning enough.”
“Okay,” she said. “Where do we start?”
“With the Goodisons,” Durant said. “Pauline and Hughes.”
“Yes, the Goodisons. Well, they wanted me to call them Paulie and Hughsie two minutes after we met. I’ve lived in this town for thirty years — and by ‘this town,’ I mean L.A. — and I didn’t have what you’d call a sheltered upbringing. By the time I was twenty I figured I’d met every kind of slime king and ooze queen known in Christendom — until I met the Goodisons.”
“Tell us about them,” Wu said.
“Okay. I met with them three times and it was after the last meeting that Howie got that phone call from Hughes Goodison who claimed he had all sorts of new information, important facts or something like that. Anyway, Hughes said he was calling from the Bel-Air but by the time Howie got there, the Goodisons’d disappeared.”
“They check out?” Durant asked.
Mott said, “No, they simply vanished, leaving everything behind.”
“Shall we go back to that first meeting with them?” Wu said.
“All right,” she said. “Here we go. The Goodisons fly in from London and check into the Bel-Air. Then they call me — or Hughes does — and after the usual jabber-jabber, he gets to it — the hypnotism. Hughes thinks it’d be nice if I came to their Bel-Air suite that has an ever so quiet and relaxing atmosphere. I’m not going to bore you with an impression of his voice, but it’s faux plummy, if you know what that sounds like and, being from London, I guess you do.”
“Yes,” Wu said. “We do.”
“Well, I learned not to go to strange men’s hotel rooms pretty early on — when I was around four or five. So I tell Hughes my house also has an atmosphere that’s ever so quiet and relaxing and that’s where the hypnotizing, if any, will take place. Then I give him the address and the directions and they show up in a limo, for God’s sake.”
“What time was this?” Durant asked.
“About four in the afternoon.”
Durant looked at Mott. “Were you here?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I wasn’t told of either the Goodisons’ arrival in L.A. Or of their appointment with Ione.”
Durant looked at Gamble. “Why not let him know?”
“I was going to call him, but then Jack Broach dropped by with some stuff I had to sign. He was still here when Hughes called and I asked him to stay. I also asked Jack if I should call Howie and he said it might be a good idea. But when I told him it was just going to be a let’s-get-acquainted session, but no hypnotism, Jack said there probably wasn’t any reason to bother Howie and I didn’t.”
Durant again looked at Mott. “You ever meet the Goodisons?”
“Just once. They came to the Santa Monica hotel where I’m staying, called me on the house phone and wanted to come up for a drink. I suggested the bar would be more comfortable. We had a drink there, some very idle talk of no consequence and they left.”
“How did you read them?”
Mott smiled slightly. “Let’s say I suspected that they lacked moral fiber.”
“Bent?”
“I’m not a mind reader.”
“Did Enno Glimm swear by them?”
“Nobody ever swore by them, Quincy. But a lot of people in London, who should’ve known better, told me they were wonderful.”
“They’re bent,” Durant said. “After I found out they’d gone missing, it took me less than twenty-four hours to learn just how bent. What bothers me is why Enno Glimm and company didn’t do the same thing.”
“I think we can get to the ‘Who Struck John?’ section of our agenda later,” Wu said. “Right now I’d like to ask Ione a few questions. Any objections?”
Hearing none, Wu leaned forward on the couch, elbows on his big knees, hands clasped. He gave Gamble the kind of smile that made her smile back and said, “The Goodisons — your very first impression?”
“Star fuckers.”
“I was thinking more of their act — the one they put on after the initial star fucking was over.”
Gamble first looked suspicious — then interested. “You knew them in London?”
“Not them, but people like them. Everyone has a personal act of some kind — especially hypnotists.”
“What’s yours?” she said.
“We usually begin with terse questions and end up offering sympathetic understanding and a measure of hope.”
She gave him a wry, even rueful smile and said, “You’re right. They had an act. It was something like going to a doctor for the first time. Even before you tell him where it hurts, he’s already into his act — shooting you those sharp little side glances while he jots down your vital statistics. Hughes and Pauline had that kind of patter. While Hughes said his lines, Pauline studied me for — well, for whatever they were looking for. Then it was Pauline’s time to talk and Hughes’s time to study.”
“You’re very observant.”
“In Howie’s trade and mine, we’re always on the lookout for blinks, smirks and twitches to steal or borrow, right, Howie?”
Mott agreed with a small nod and a smaller smile.
“What happened when their act was over?” Durant said.
“They offered to hypnotize me — sort of a test run kind of thing. When I said I wasn’t ready yet, they offered to put on a demonstration. So I said okay and Hughes put Pauline into a trance in about five seconds flat. I mean, zap — she was under. He then took her back to when she was six and asked her to show us what she’d learned that day at dancing school. She got up and did an awkward little time step and sat back down.”
“Then what?” Wu asked.
“He brought her out of it looking relaxed, happy and not remembering anything — or saying she didn’t. And that’s when Hughes asked if he could test my receptiveness. I told him I still didn’t want to be hypnotized yet. Well, he turns on all of his considerable smarm and says he can’t hypnotize anyone who resists it and that he just wants to test my receptiveness, which was a word he really seemed to like. Then he starts talking about all the stars who’re known for their receptiveness. About half of them are long dead but still it was kind of an impressive list. And since Jack was there, I said all right.”
She paused then and asked, “Would you guys like coffee or something to drink?”
Wu shook his head. “I think we’d rather hear the end of the story.”
“Okay. Well, we’re all still here in the office — me, Jack, Hughes and Pauline. Then Hughes is telling me to relax, close my eyes and think of all the colors in the rainbow and name them one by one. So I do and feel myself sort of going — I don’t know where — under, I guess. But I fight it and snap back. When I open my eyes, Hughes and Pauline are looking disappointed and Jack is looking half-amused, the way he always does. So I get rid of the Goodisons by agreeing to another session the next day.”
She stopped talking and turned in her chair to stare again through the floor-to-ceiling window at ocean and canyon. She was still looking at the view when she said, “But by the next day I’d decided I wasn’t going to be hypnotized by anybody— especially not by the Goodisons.”
She turned back. “I let them try anyway and the same thing happens. I started to go under — then snapped myself back. Their third and last test of my so-called receptiveness ended the same way. And that’s when I told them there weren’t going to be any more sessions and it was the last time I ever saw them.”
“What was their reaction?” Wu said.
“Nothing much. They apologized for not being more helpful and that was that. They left.”
Durant looked at Howard Mott. “And this was the same day you got that panicky call from Hughes Goodison?”
“Yes,” Mott said.
Artie Wu sighed and rose. He went slowly over to the Memphis cotton broker’s desk, picked up the long yellow pencil and began rolling it with the thumbs and fingers of both hands. “When Hughes tested your receptiveness that first time, did he use any object such as this pencil?”
She stared at the pencil. “No.”
“But he talked about the colors of the rainbow?”
“Yes.”
“He asked you to concentrate on them, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And say them aloud?”
“Yes.”
“Yellow’s a rainbow color, isn’t it, Ione?”
“Yes.”
“Like the yellow of this pencil.”
“Yes.”
“Close your eyes and tell me if you can still see the yellow.”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t it make you feel relaxed?”
“Yes.”
“When you’re fully relaxed, Ione, you’ll go to sleep. To help you relax, think of the rainbow again. Start with red. When you get to the last color, yellow, you’ll be fully, completely relaxed.”
“All right.”
“Have you reached yellow?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to remember something you tried to remember but couldn’t?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to remember the night you drove to Billy’s house?”
“Yes.”
“Remember what happened that night, Ione. Remember it aloud — everything that happened from the time you left your house.”
She began to speak in a soft voice and told all about her fast drive to the beach house of William A. C. Rice IV and what she found there and about the one phone call she made.